The Night Guardian

Negahban-e-Shab

Banoo Film

VERDICT:  For the fourth time, award-winning director Reza Mirkarimi is repping Iran at the Oscars with ‘The Night Guardian’, handling a predictably downbeat social drama set amid Iran’s swelling underclass with a delicate, sensitive touch, illuminated by young actor Touraj Alvand.  

Coming of age in poverty in today’s Iran, and taking on a man’s role and responsibilities in a society corrupt inside and out, is a harsh theme that has been reappearing in various guises in festival hits from Iran.

In fact, the drama of honest men vainly struggling to be good citizens and to do the right thing has been a unifying theme in the country’s recent official Oscar submissions — Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero comes from this wellspring, as does Houman Seyyedi’s dark World War III. Perhaps everyday personal tragedies are more acceptable to the hardliners running the country than sticky topics like capital punishment, drug addiction and women’s rights? Yet the bleak vision of entrapment and exploitation that Reza Mirkarimi’s The Night Guardian conveys both narratively and pictorially reveals, often in a shocking way, a society that has gone seriously off the tracks.

With notable social realism, the action takes place on a tawdry building site where a teachers’ cooperative has commissioned and prepaid for a residential complex that has never come near completion. Adorning the naked slabs of concrete that thrust out of skeleton buildings are years of torn plastic sheeting and shredded debris. The only “unit” that has been completed, in a half-hearted sort of way, is the night watchman’s guardhouse. This is where awkward, raw-faced Rasoul (Touraj Alvand), a naïve 25-year-old country boy, comes to roost after leaving his drought-stricken village to find work in Tehran.

In an opening scene that echoes World War III, a gaggle of men looking for day work mill around the side of a road early in the morning, hoping to be selected by a foreman with a truck. It seems miraculous to young Rasoul that he is picked out of the crowd by a brusque contractor in an SUV, which he gratefully takes as a divine sign that he was right to come to Tehran. His open, sympathetic face is in stark contrast to the guarded cunning of the contractor, Behnam (Mohsen Kiayee), who begins by asking if he has any collateral to put up, if he is given the night watchman’s job.

The boy, who looks born to be bamboozled, blithely mentions a drought-ridden scrap of land he has inherited, and the film’s whole plot seems ready to unfold as a standard rich-exploiting-poor victimization drama. But the screenplay by Mirkarimi and his regular cowriter Mohammad Davoudi (Castle of Dreams) is a lot more subtle than that, and after a slow and somewhat tedious first act that sets up the situation over the course of a long hour, the film becomes well worth watching.

Rasoul gradually gets acclimatized to life on the hellish building site, which is deserted apart from an occasional “show day” staged to hoodwink the home buyers with the erroneous idea that something is under construction. His principal contact is with a withered old man (Aliakbar Osanloo) who seems to be the foreman and was once the owner of the land.

The boy’s respectful treatment of his elder bears fruit and, in a roundabout way, the oldster offers him his daughter Nassibeh in marriage. Having already spotted Nassibeh (Laleh Marzban) from a distance, Rasoul is more than ready to take the plunge, and he reflects on his great fortune at having found a job and a wife his first days in the city. Their chaste courtship is brief and sweet, and the next scene shows them wearing borrowed wedding finery, being photographed by the press as they go to vote in the local elections on their wedding day.

Of course, this odd scene has all been arranged by Behnam to make nice with his political sponsor. It lacks a bit of resonance in the film, though, where the political undercurrents of the story remain murky and underdeveloped — though they are probably all too familiar to local audiences. But you get the idea that these trusting young people are being exploited royally, and they don’t seem to care. Eventually payday falls due as the film draws to a close and, of course, it’s Rasoul who takes the brunt of the punishment for the failed construction project. But the ending is nuanced, like the characters, and with some difficulty the scriptwriters find a way to close things on an upbeat note, although hardly a realistic one — indeed, the ultimate fantasy ending.

Mirkarimi won Best Director at this year’s Fajr festival for this film, and his skillful handling of the characters is supported by a well-chosen cast, notably the likable Alvand in the main role, who lets some intelligence shine through even as he is being led into a trap, one that toughens him up quickly into a man without, one hopes, destroying the good in him. Marzban makes a perfect foil for innocent romance, showing that Nassibeh is not as timid as she first looks, and both actors enrich their roles with a touching sensitivity to the other’s problems. As the forgetful father heading into full-on Alzheimer’s, Osanloo pulls more than his weight in a supporting role.

Very beautifully used are the old Persian and Azerbaijani songs heard on the radio from time to time, adding a subtly wistful strain to the grungy modern setting and story. The nervous hand-held camerawork does indeed get on the nerves after a while, though it gives the drawn-out scenes some needed tension, while the warm, golden toned lighting from DP Morteza Hodaei is most welcome.

Director, producer, editor: Reza Mirkarimi
Screenwriters: Mohammad Davoudi, Reza Mirkarimi
Cast: Touraj Alvand, Laleh Marzban, Mohsen Kiayee, Kiumars Poorahmad, Vishka Asayesh, Aliakbar Osanloo
Executive producer:  Mohammad Sadegh Mirkarimi
Cinematography: Morteza Hodaei
Production design: Saeed Hasanloo
Costume design: Zahra Samadi
Music: Foad Hejazi
Sound: Amir Hossein Ghasemi
Production companies: Reza Mirkarimi Productions (Tehran)

In Farsi, Azerbaijani
118 minutes